Marketing writing is more important than ever. In a sea of businesses vying for your attention, the best writers often stand out because they can write clearly and persuasively. But they aren’t doing it alone.
Marketers who do a lot of writing need tools that can help them keep up with deadlines, maintain their writing quality, optimized for digital use, and even help remove some of the workload using automation. As of now, there’s not one surefire tool that can do everything. However, using the right selection of tools can help you write engaging, accurate, and optimized copy.
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1. Grammarly—The Marketing Writing Tool for Grammar, Style, and Structure
Proofreading is essential in marketing writing. Typos can hurt your brand’s image, completely change the meaning of copy accidentally, weaken your message, or just make you look dumb. Luckily, for writers who must pump out tons of content every day, there are tools that have your back.
As of now, there are two main ones that writers should use to keep their marketing writing in ship shape:
- Grammarly: Aside from its highly accurate editing ability, Grammarly is the best tool for grammar and style because it integrates right into your browser to live edit Google Docs and Word Docs without having to enter the copy into another tool. Grammarly goes beyond just fixing typos; it helps you correct your tone of voice, re-order phrasing for clarity, and adjust your writing to increase readability.
- Hemingway: Hemingway does a lot of what Grammarly does (grammar fixes, readability, phrasing, etc.) and in some ways drills deeper into the writing. Hemingway’s real strength comes in helping you shape your writing to match certain tones and styles by analyzing words on a larger level. But it lacks the feature which makes Grammarly the ultimate tool: Hemingway requires you to copy and paste your words into their separate tool in order to get the writing recommendations.
But of these are free (with paid options), but the top choice for editing, style, and improving your writing as you do it is Grammarly for its ease of use, accuracy, and friendly UI.
2. HubSpot—Content Marketing Writing Software
For content—blogs, eBooks, websites, infographics, videos, etc.—marketers need more than a writing tool. They need software to help them post to their website, gather data, optimize writing, build conversion forms, track views, and more.
The most prominent content marketing writing software that can do it all is HubSpot's CMS. It has built-in tools for posting and scheduling content, data tracking, usage statistics, lead generation, optimization, and much more.
Additionally, it works well with thousands of integrations—including prominent ones like Google Analytics, SEMRush (and other SEO tools), and most social media platforms—that can be paired and used effectively on HubSpot itself.
Alternatives to HubSpot would be any CMS that allows for blog and content posting like WordPress, Joomla, Shopify, or Wix.
3. ChatGPT—AI Content Writing Tool
Defeating the blank page is one of a writer’s greatest challenges. Endless possibilities are exciting, but too much choice often leads to feeling overwhelmed and anxious which leads to that dreaded “fear of the blank page.”
ChatGPT, an AI model created by OpenAI, can pull information from content across the internet and allow you to use it to help you get started. Though there are some grey areas being navigated as to what is and isn't plagiarism when it comes to using AI to write, any writer can use it to help them ideate blog topics, create outlines, and make the first mark on a blank sheet.
How does this work? As the writer, you’d give ChatGPT a prompt that explains exactly what you need. Something like “give me a five-point outline for a blog about writing software” would work and, in response, ChatGPT would write exactly that. This doesn’t have to just be for outlines, either. You could ask for an intro paragraph, a good headline, or even an entire blog.
4. SEMrush—SEO Content Writing Software
In the age of the internet, Google is king. That means your content needs to appease Google in order to show up on its search engine results pages (SERPs). To do this, you optimize by finding keywords/key phrases that have good search volume and match your target audience’s reason for searching.
This may sound difficult to do on your own, and it is! That’s why digital marketers everywhere turn to tools like SEMrush to help them find keywords and phrases easily. A tool like SEMrush finds popular search terms and displays key information about them like the average number of monthly searches, level of difficulty to rank on the first page of SERPs, search intent, and alternative keywords.
SEMrush has a simplified free version that anyone can use to do simple keyword research. But the paid versions unlock more detailed information that can be used when planning content.
If you use this data wisely and put it into practice in your content, it can help your content rank better which means it gets in front of more people (and the right people).
Aside from SEMrush, there are additional tools that tackle SEO research like Moz, ahrefs, and Google Search Console.
5. The Most Useful Tool for Collaborative Writing: Google Docs and Word for Web
This one shouldn’t be a surprise to many copywriters or digital marketing professionals. Google Docs and Word for Web are the most tried and true online word processors available because they do what they do very well.
Aside from allowing you to write via keyboard, both these tools have ample ways to collaborate, including:
- Live Edits: With Google Docs/Word for Web, you can have your entire team editing the same document at the same time rather than having to send the file around the team multiple times. This drastically speeds up the editing/proofing process and eliminates the feedback loops that can stall projects.
- Easy Sharing: Sharing a document with people inside and outside of your organization is as easy as clicking a button and copying a link. You can also download the file as a document to save on your computer hard drive, print, or send.
- Integration with Google Drive and OneDrive: Saving and sharing your documents is not automatic thanks to both word processors’ integrations with their respective cloud storage partners. This helps organize files, make them easy to find and share, and keeps them secure.
What Other Resources Do You Need for Marketing?
Copywriting is just one part of marketing. To ensure that you’re telling a consistent story across your brand and actually converting your audience, you need a slate of tools that each fill certain niches in a larger strategy. Just like with marketing writing tools, there’s no one solution that can do it all. Instead, you need to build a complete marketing tech stack that fits your needs.
Download our guide, The Ultimate List of Marketing Resources for Any Campaign, to get a useful guidebook that will walk you through all the key things any marketing campaign needs to be successful.